A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War (139 page)

Neither of the two British participants in Jacob Thompson’s guerrilla war against the North—Colonel George St. Leger Grenfell or Bennet G. Burley—ever returned to the South. Grenfell’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas Islands, seventy miles west of the Florida Keys in the Gulf of Mexico. His other cellmates were the four conspirators in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination who did not receive capital sentences. One, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who treated the injured John Wilkes Booth during the actor’s flight from justice, became good friends with Grenfell, and in 1867 he sent a description of Grenfell’s treatment to his brother-in-law:

Colonel St. Ledger Grenfel [
sic
] is kept in close confinement under guard. A few days ago, being sick, he applied to the doctor of the Post for medical attention, which he was refused, and he was ordered to work. Feeling himself unable to move about, he refused. He was then ordered to carry a ball until further orders, which he likewise refused. He was then tied up for half a day, and still refusing, he was taken to one of the wharves, thrown overboard with a rope attached, and ducked; being able to keep himself above water, a fifty pound weight was attached to his feet. Grenfel is an old man, about sixty. He has never refused to do work which he was able to perform, but they demanded more than he felt able, and he wisely refused. They could not conquer him, and he is doing now that which he never objected doing.
¹³

On March 6, 1868, Grenfell tried to escape from the Dry Tortugas along with three other prisoners. They were caught in a storm and the little boat disappeared. Afterward there was the occasional “sighting” of Grenfell, but there is little doubt that he drowned somewhere in the Gulf.

Bennet Burley had better luck. He had been incarcerated in Port Clinton, the capital of Ottawa County, Ohio, and was awaiting his second trial (the first having resulted in a hung jury) when, in September 1865, a well-wisher brought him an apple pie to celebrate the start of apple-picking season. Hidden beneath the crust was a sharpened iron file. Burley escaped to Detroit, where he was able to cross the river to Canada and to freedom. He became a journalist and in 1881 settled down to a long career as the foreign correspondent for the London
Daily Telegraph.
Burleigh (he changed the spelling) was joined at the
Telegraph
by George Augustus Sala (Belle Boyd’s sometime protector) and Francis Lawley, who had returned to England shortly after Appomattox. Dropped by Sala, Belle took advantage of the general amnesty declared by President Johnson in 1866 to go back to the United States, where she earned a living as an actress until her marriage in 1869 to Lieutenant John Swainston Hammond, a former British volunteer in the Federal army.
¹⁴
Lawley’s return to England had a less happy outcome: his creditors continued to pursue him, and the salary he earned from writing about the turf (a subject he knew well) was not enough to stave off bankruptcy. There were still outstanding debts against his estate when he died in 1901. His fellow pro-Southern journalist Frank Vizetelly continued as a war artist and reporter until he was killed in 1883 while covering the fighting in the Sudan between the Anglo-Egyptian army under William Hicks (known as Hicks Pasha) and the Mahdi rebels.

Canada was a popular hiding place for many Southern fugitives. Jefferson Davis resided there for a time after his release from prison in 1867. At first it had seemed likely that the former Confederate president would be tried and executed for masterminding Lincoln’s assassination. But when no evidence could be produced against him, the grounds for prosecution became more complicated. The question was still unresolved when Davis was given bail on May 13, 1867. It was a further two years before the threat of legal action against him and thirty-seven other Confederate leaders, including Robert E. Lee, was dropped by the U.S. government. Davis lived on for another twenty years, beset by financial misfortune and family tragedies, but a defiant relic of the Confederate States to the last. Lee, in contrast, was a firm advocate of reconciliation with the North. He became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia (later Washington and Lee University), a post he held until his death in 1870.

The last Confederate war secretary, John Breckinridge, and the commissioners James Mason, Clement C. Clay, and Jacob Thompson also returned to the United States from Canada once they were confident of receiving amnesty. Despite his leading role in the Confederates’ terror operations in Canada, Thompson was never prosecuted for his crimes. He chose Memphis, Tennessee, as his new home, his wealth mysteriously untouched despite the war—there was always speculation that some of his fortune came from the $1 million entrusted to him by the Confederacy in 1864.

Thompson was extremely fortunate, especially in light of the terror and destruction he had tried to inflict upon the North. His colleagues in Europe never dared return to the United States, since they were not included in any of the official pardons. Ambrose Dudley Mann, the commissioner in Brussels, and John Slidell, the commissioner in Paris, stayed in France; the Confederate financial agent Colin McRae emigrated to Belize, and the chief of Confederate operations abroad, James Bulloch, remained in Liverpool. His brother, Irvine, was one of the last Confederates to surrender when his ship CSS
Shenandoah
sailed into Liverpool on November 6, 1865.
^epl.2
Both Bullochs are buried at Toxteth Park Cemetery in Liverpool.

The former Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin also died abroad. He arrived in England in July 1865 after a harrowing escape from Florida and retrained as a barrister. He became an expert in commercial law and in 1868 he published a treatise on that topic, popularly known as “Benjamin on Sales”; the book’s immediate success assured his financial stability for the rest of his life. Striving to put the past behind him (and burdened by many secrets), Benjamin generally avoided the other Confederate exiles. He made no effort to see Henry Hotze despite their close relationship during the war. Hotze, for his part, had no interest in refashioning himself to suit the times; he remained an unapologetic supporter of slavery and the creed of white supremacy. But his hope of publishing a magazine dedicated to crushing the aspirations of freed blacks was soon quashed, and he became a propagandist for hire, working for any government or ruler who required his arts. He died in Zug, Switzerland, in 1887.
¹⁵

Lord Lyons died a few months after Hotze, having served in the Foreign Office for forty-eight years—the last twenty of them as the British ambassador to France, the highest-ranking post in the diplomatic service. Once Lyons had recovered from the neuralgia that had forced him to leave Washington, he found that retirement was far worse than being overworked, and he eagerly accepted Lord Russell’s offer in October 1865 of the embassy in Constantinople. Lyons himself was too modest to recognize his altered standing in the Foreign Office, but instead of the lonely midlevel diplomat who had incited derision at Washington, he was now a highly respected representative of Her Majesty’s government whose dignified though conciliatory approach in delicate situations made him invaluable. After only a year in Constantinople, he was rewarded with the Paris embassy, and there he spent the remainder of his life, in great comfort and satisfaction, served faithfully by several of his former attachés from the Washington legation.

In his own way, Benjamin Moran also reached the summit of his capabilities—if not his ambitions—when in 1876, after twenty-three years at the U.S. legation in London, he was sent to run the legation in Lisbon in 1876, where he showed that he was not without talentz as a diplomat. That year,
The New York Times
described him as “one of the most capable and experienced diplomats in the service of the United States.”
¹⁶
He ruled over his little kingdom for six years, gleefully bullying his staff, until his retirement in 1882, when he returned to England and passed the last four years of his life in Braintree, Essex. At his death, the humble printer’s son from Chester, Pennsylvania, was praised by
The Times
as the “ablest and most honest” representative the United States had ever sent to Great Britain.
¹⁷

—

On July 27, 1866, Cyrus Field stood on the deck of the
Great Eastern
watching through his binoculars as engineers hauled the transatlantic cable ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Finally, after five attempts in nine years, a cable sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of the Atlantic was laid along the 1,800-mile undersea shelf between Ireland and Canada. The cable’s first message, sent through on the twenty-eighth, announced the signing of the armistice between Prussia and Austria. The Americans had been as surprised as the rest of Europe by the speed and efficiency with which Prussia had defeated Austria in the Seven Weeks’ War. The Battle of Sadowa on July 3 had involved nearly half a million soldiers, the largest concentration of troops to date in either Europe or America. The Prussian military observers in the United States during the Civil War had been impressed by how rapidly armies and artillery could be transported by railroad, and during the past year the Prussian war minister had created a Field Railway Section modeled on the Union Construction Corps. The Prussians had also benefited from the close attention they had paid to Civil War developments in artillery and communications.
¹⁸

The second message to reach Newfoundland was from Queen Victoria to President Andrew Johnson, congratulating him “on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of Union between the United States and England.” At the moment it was just a hope: Austria’s recent defeat had added another layer of complexity to a relationship that was already tense as a result of the unresolved issues left by the Civil War. Prussia’s emergence as the dominant military nation among her neighbors was redrawing of the balance of power in Europe. France was now menaced by a credible threat, and the German Confederation no longer answered to Vienna but to Berlin. It was too soon to tell how these changes would affect Britain and America, but British politicians were worried that it would be the same old story of England facing two threats at once. “It is the unfriendly state of our relations with America that to a great extent paralyses our action in Europe,” Russell’s replacement as foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, would shortly admit. “There is not the smallest doubt that if we were engaged in a Continental quarrel we should immediately find ourselves at war with the United States.”
¹⁹

During a Commons debate on March 13, 1865, Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had tried to brush away the many crises of the past four years by putting them down to a family quarrel: “The North wished us to declare on their side and the South on theirs, and we wished to maintain a perfect neutrality.” But this simplification of the arguments between the two countries carried no weight outside the Commons, and little even there. According to
The Times
and a majority of the British public, both sides had behaved badly. The United States had never supported Britain in any war, including the Crimean, and yet neither the North nor the South had seen the contradiction in demanding British aid once the situation was reversed. Both had unscrupulously stooped to threats and blackmail in their attempts to gain support, the South using cotton, the North using Canada. Both were guilty in their mistreatment of Negroes, both had shipped arms from England, and both had benefited from British volunteers. In America, the perception that Lord Russell had behaved like a villain and that the British ruling classes had schemed with the Confederacy to overthrow the Union in the hope of destroying democracy was so pervasive that the historian George Bancroft digressed upon it during his eulogy on Lincoln before Congress on February 12, 1866.
²⁰
Like most Americans, he shared the belief that the declaration of neutrality had been nothing more than an underhanded attempt at recognizing the independence of the South; that the British government had connived with the Confederates to send out the commerce raiders; and that the blockade runners had been allowed to operate with impunity because they enabled the South to keep fighting long after its own supplies were exhausted.

Senator Charles Sumner played a discreditable part in promulgating the myth that Britain had acted maliciously and illegally by awarding belligerent status to the South. His friends in England, especially the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, felt betrayed by his attacks. “You know how heartily my Duke has been with you all through,” the duchess objected on July 4, 1865. “I protest again against your supposing it a proof of Lord Russell’s ill-will.… As to the haste, I suppose there would have been less of it, if the consequence attached to it by you had been foreseen.”
²¹
Lord Russell was so incensed by Sumner’s slurs on his motives and intentions toward the North that he rejected Charles Francis Adams’s proposal in the summer of 1865 for an international arbitrator to consider American claims against Britain, complaining that his successes against the Confederates seemed to count for nothing, whereas his failures—none of which he believed were his fault—counted for everything. Palmerston’s death on October 18, which elevated Russell to the prime ministership once again, removed the only person who would have had weight and influence to show Russell that there could be another approach to the claims.